[Animation] ‘Labyrinth’ (1963) by Jan Leniča
When I first watched this animated short film, my knee-jerk reaction was: This would be just the perfect style of art direction if The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov were ever to adapted into animation. (Has anyone read that book?)
Labyrinth (1963) was an award-winner at the Annecy International Animated Film Festival in 1963. The plot (as far as I could make out) goes something like this: A flying man descends on an entirely deserted city where the only other man seems to have his body encased in a machine. In the city, his encounter with the fair sex seems rather unfortunate – the first lady prefers the embrace of a beast, the second lady devours his flesh. Then he undergoes (among other things) some kind of brainwashing experiment, after which he kisses a bird in the mouth. Finally he flies, leaving the deserted city, only to be devoured by black birds in the sky…
May I also add that the background music sounds very… Alban Berg? If you like that sort of music that gives off a macabre vibe, you may also like to check out György Ligeti’s opera Le Grand Macabre. (Has anyone listened to Alban Berg and György Ligeti?)
In any case, you can see Labyrinth for yourself on YouTube below:
bizarre…i’ve watched it in the past, still can’t get a proper meaning out of it.
P.S.:may I ask? has your mail changed? how can we contact you? because I’ve send you sth but don’t know, if you got it.
It probably got filtered out as spam. Please use the comment section of this blog if you have something to say.
“(Has anyone read that book?)”
Sure, it’s one of my all-time favorites. Manuscripts don’t burn! In case you didn’t know, they made it into a rather faithful live action TV mini-series a few years ago in Russia. (Even kept the nudity, somewhat to my surprise.) I’m not sure if it’s available in anything but Russian, but as I recall you’re no stranger to the language.
I’m a little curious about what you thought of the book, as it’s rare (for me, anyway) to find people familiar with it who don’t have the kind of system it satirizes in their memories or historic background. Or would present-day China also be a good place for a foreign professor to present a lecture debunking black magic?
Kirito:
*gasp*
Мастер и Маргарита was made into TV! I never knew that! Many thanks for informing me!
I just checked it out on RuTube. (How could I ever live without RuTube?) The ball scene looks interesting -
http://rutube.ru/tracks/861176.html?v=81500db332658b42c912d8ee1b37aebc
There are too many things to say about the book. Perhaps I will find an opportunity to write more about it in greater length. I am always searching for reading materials in Russian and it is high time that I reread the book in the original.
I have never lived in the sort of system that the book makes fun of. The book was recommended to me many years ago by a Russian mathematician, as it was also one of his all-time favorite books. I have not spoken to him for many years. I wonder what he would make of the TV adaptation? (He told me that he never watched TV, and being one of the hardest men to please I have ever known, I came to be under the general impression that it would probably be easier to drag a cow up to the top of a tree than to make him watch TV.)
Still, I have to say that it is just one of those books that I prefer to see animated than acted out by real actors.
I know it’s irrelevant, but I was wondering, if you could make a post about the word ‘yasashii’. It’s a quite common yet beautiful word, which sounds as tender as its meaning. I am interested in knowing more about it, since you often contemplate on words’ meanings.
Noted with thanks.
I’ve heard Alfred Schnittke’s part-amusing, part-terrifying re-appropriation of Ravel for a stage play of The Master and Margarita. It reminded me of you connecting that novel with Jan Leniča and, despite me being unlikely to ever read such a big novel, inspired me to want to film it as a “children’s TV series for adults,” a dark cousin of Mr. Benn with occasional touches of actual animation…